A Woman Won $10,000 For Reading The Fine Print Of An Insurance Policy That Turned Out To Be A Secret Contest
AP- A Florida travel insurance company has awarded a Georgia high school teacher $10,000 for reading the fine print in a policy she recently purchased. A Squaremouth statement says Donelan Andrews claimed the prize 23 hours after the contest began.
The St. Petersburg-based company says it launched the secret contest Feb. 11. Buried in the fine print was a promise of $10,000 for the first person to send an email to a specific address. Besides the $10,000 for Andrews, Squaremouth says it’s giving another $10,000 to a children’s literacy charity, plus $5,000 each to the two schools where Andrews teaches consumer economics.
Usually when someone wins a bunch of money for basically nothing, I get filled with rage and jealousy because while they are moving on up to the East Side, I remain trapped in my lower-middle class life that consists of trying to make ends meet during the day and feeding my family of four blue box macaroni and cheese at night. It doesn’t matter if it’s someone winning the lottery, finding a million dollar baseball card in their attic, or marrying a wonderful sugar mama that has as much brains as beauty like Large did. I have nothing but hate in my heart for those that fall as backwards into good fortune.
However, I have no choice but to tip my cap to Donelan Andrews for being a huge nerd. Never in a million years would I look at the fine print of an insurance policy. I have bought a house, multiple cars, co-create 2 kids, got married, and made all the big purchases needed to go along with all of them as well as the insurance policies needed to protect myself in case anything goes drastically wrong. Not in my mortgage, not in my auto loans, not in the contracts I signed for my wedding’s vendors, not on my kid’s birth certificates or my wedding certificate (if there is any), and definitely not on my insurance policies. I have signed my life away so many times, I’m pretty sure if I kick the bucket tomorrow, there will barely even be one slice of the shit pie of assets I have accumulated to go to my family. I’ve read the fine print of important papers I am signing as often as I read the Customer Agreement Policies of online mumbo jumbo: Not once, not never. Nope!
Even if I had the eye power and was smart enough to understand what I was reading, I realize that there are smarter people in the world that could still figure out a way to swindle me regardless of how ironclad the wording appeared to be. So I check the box, sign the paper, or whatever else needs to be done to mindlessly go about my day. So am I jealous that Mrs. Andrews got money for doing 2 seconds of due dilligence? Not even a little. Because those 2 seconds come after spending 20,000 hours of reading every bit of fine print that has ever come across her desk, which by my math equals $0.50/hour. Which is why I believe that hypothetically trading in $10,000 for knowing you never have to read all that lawyer jargon every time you sign a piece of paper is the deal of the century in my mind. I may spend that time doing nothing but staring at Twitter like a neanderthal, but my time and peace of mind is literally priceless.
As for the insurance company, they are officially rebuked for causing God knows how many other people to start reading the fine print of all their important documents in the name of a secret contest, which is more fucked up than any game Jigsaw ever played on his victim in the Saw movies.
Also while we’re here, I wanted to give a quick shout out to the old school human version of fine print, the Micro Machines guy.
Micro Machines Guy could have used his powers by whizzing through all the side effects your medication would give you and we would have been none the wiser. Instead he used his powers for good and described some of the best toys from the 90s in painstaking detail in 15 seconds or less. A true legend of the advertising game, and if we are being honest, humanity.